"A House of Representatives panel has approved a sweeping new copyright bill that would boost penalties for peer-to-peer piracy and increase federal police powers against Internet copyright infringement." - CNETThe TeleRead take: It'll be easier than ever for the feds to demand information from Net providers. Where are we headed? Allow me to trot out the W word. Remember? Watergate. I predict that just as the Nixonians used national security as an excuse to snoop on political foes, a present or future administration will use copyright to do the same.Could just as easily be a Democratic administration as a...

Small publishers aren't the only ones who may feel grumpy about OverDrive, the besieged distributor and retailer that charges one-book publishers $300 a year in storage fees. Random House's traffic rank for contentlinkinc.com, the domain associated with the ContentLink eBook Store which uses OverDrive-provided DRM and e-commerce-related services, isn't even on Alexa's list of the top 100,000 Web sites. ContentLink's three-month average, as noted by an Alexa link from Blackmask Online, is a pathetic 576,691.Mind, you OverDrive isn't be the only reason here for the debacle, and, of course, the Random House part of the Bertelsmann conglomerate focuses on...

"A collection of rare Christian manuscripts...

A friend of mine owns a library of 10,000 dead-tree books, but many if not most of them are in storage. He is no Luddite, but would rather not mess around with all the fuss of downloading e-books. Just how to convert people like him to e-books, at least the public domain variety?Until this week my answer for classics-lovers would have been, "Just go to Blackmask Online, the easiest-to-use site for public domain books. All the major formats are available." In fact, Blackmask remains an attractive option, especially for PDA owners. But now there is another good choice for...

yBook is a little-known but important program in the e-book world. It lets even nontechies enjoy Project Gutenberg books. Via yBook, you can find, download, read and even print them. What's more, in the spirit of Gutenberg, yBook is free unless you want to make a donation via PayPal. I'll be posting the review by 5 p.m. Washington, DC, time....

Project Gutenberg of Australia has posted a sample letter to protest copyright-term extension Down Under, as provided in a rather problematic Free Trade Treaty. A laudable cause for Australians.In addition, Americans might want to write very polite letters to Australian politicians telling them that our shameful Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act is at odds with even U.S. traditions. Mention how Congress passed it by stealth in the middle of the Clinton impeachment controversy--without the normal procedures used to record votes.You can get a list of Members of Parliament in Australia and even email the office of Prime Minister...

Bill Gates is an odd bird. He's made tens of billions off us because he wants to sock away cash and own everything. Love of ownership is strong. Why else are people so POed about e-books that end up unreadable--because the supposedly trustworthy vendors went kaput?Now Billg plans to offer some new delights from Microsoft for his friends in the music industry--songs that expire, via clocked DRM, if you don't keep your music subscription current. A brand-new Pocket PC Thoughts article has inspired a flood of anti-Microsoft diatribes from PPCT readers.Already, of course, the library world has used the...

E-books could get a boost if an experimental $645 tablet/PDA hybrid from NEC takes off.The specs as reported in the Japanese-language PC Watch and translated for Tech Japan: the Linux OS, an 8.4-inch 640X480 touchscreen LCD and a CD-ROM.NEC will make just 4,000 of the Linux tablets the first year, so don't count on seeing one at your local CompUSA, but, as a Slashdot contributor observes, the new machine is a helpful start by a major Japanese company Meanwhile Sun's Linux will be reaching Wal-Mart via Microtel machines, raising the intriguing possibility that perhaps Sun or partners like Microtel...

Bill Gates is now predicting "almost free computers" within a decade--and within reason I'd agree....

A fuel cell powers an experimental PDA from Hitachi, and NEC's in the FC game, too, along with Toshiba. NEC plans to stretch battery life to 40 hours and put its PDA on sale in '05. (Via Slashdot.)...

E-books as tax-money-savers? You bet--in Texas, at least if you go by a news story about a Dallas-area school, where e-books are said to have replaced the paper kind completely. From the WISH TV Web site in Indianapolis:It's not just high-tech for the sake of it. Laptops will replace an armload of textbooks, making students' loads lighter. News 8 found out about a school down in Texas that is trying to make the switch from heavy to high tech.At Johnson Elementary School in Forney, just outside of Dallas, Texas, students have been reading "The Emperor's New Clothes." They're trading...

Info here about the forthcoming audio of Free Culture....